


Yesterday, Upon the Stair

by samalander



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Coming to SHIELD, Gen, Harm to Animals, Imaginary Friends, Mindfuck, Murder, Natasha is recruited, Perception, SHIELD, Training, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-08
Updated: 2013-06-08
Packaged: 2017-12-14 08:18:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/834706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was little Natasha had an imaginary friend. But like all little girls, she learned to forget him as she grew up. So imagine her surprise when one day she comes face to face with her old friend</p><p>And he's pointing an arrow at her heart</p><p>  <em>Barton was sent to kill me. he made a different call.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Yesterday, Upon the Stair

**Author's Note:**

> **This is a violent story. Please see the end of the story for full warnings.**
> 
>  
> 
>  _Yesterday, upon the stair,_  
>  _I met a man who wasn't there_  
>  _He wasn't there again today_  
>  _I wish, I wish he'd go away_ \- Antigonish, Hughes Mearns
> 
> With thanks to everyone on tumblr who reblogged this idea, especially [arms-and-arrows](http://arms-and-arrows.tumblr.com/), and to [Enigma731](http://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731), who shoved me into writing, and cheerled and betaed, and to [Sugarfey](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SugarFey) who is a kickass cheerleader.

The night her parents burn, he holds her hand. The snow is deep, up to her knees, and she is wet and cold and the smoke chokes her, but her hand is warm in his. She knows he's not real, but he feels real. Someone woke her up and took her out of the house as the fire ate up the walls, someone told her to keep going as the heat started to blister her bare feet and hands.

He's holding one of her hands, now, and it doesn't even hurt where the fire touched her. She likes the feel of him standing next to her, even if she knows, in her heart, that it's fantasy. So she calls him friend and let him be there if he wants.

Men come to the house, men who want to help. The put the fire out and give her a blanket to huddle under that keeps the wind from seeping through the thin layer of her nightgown. They bandage her hands and feet and put her in an ambulance, but none of them react to her friend, who stands stalwart by her side, riding along on the way to the hospital.

He's even there when they put her in a room, as they tuck her into a bed and she asks for mama and papa. The doctors tell her, then, that mama and papa are gone, that the fire swallowed them up and it is such a miracle that she survived. She wants to cry, wants to burst into tears because _mama and papa_ , but her friend holds her hand and kisses her forehead and tells her to sleep.

"What is your name?" she asks him, because she realizes that she's known this man - with his blunt nose and his heavy arms - for hours now, and she hasn't asked.

"What do you want it to be?"

Natasha thinks about that for a moment. She knows a lot of names, and she doesn't think there are any she knows that don't already belong to people, that are right for her friend.

"Can I call you Alexei?" she asks, because it was her father's name, and he's not using it anymore.

"You can," her friend agrees, "if you want."

She smiles at him, feeling the tug of sleep, even among the beeping machines and the excitement of the night, the fire still dancing behind her eyes. 

"Will you be here when I wake up?" she asks, suddenly terrified that the answer will be no, that he will disappear or be swallowed like mama and papa.

"For as long as you need me," he says, and she's not sure she believes that, but it will do for now.

* * *

The Red Room finds her after a few days in the hospital, when her skin is beginning to glow pink where it had been an angry red with burns.

Alexei is still by her bed, sitting quietly every time she looks. He doesn't seem to get bored like she does, and he doesn't seem to mind that there are a thousand million people poking her and taking her blood away. He doesn't even seem to notice that she's the only one who talks to him.

("There's no one there," one of the nurses says, when Natasha asks for an extra pudding for him, and that's just rude. Alexei is there, and he's not a no one.)

The man who shows up to recruit Natasha says his name is Ivanov, and he looks like the exact opposite of Alexei. He doesn't talk or move like him. He doesn't have the same kind, crinkly eyes that Alexei has. But he does say a lot of words to Natasha; he tells her about a school he knows, where little girls like her learn to be their best selves. He calls her extraordinary, which is what papa used to call her when she would do something new – when she was little, he liked to come home from work and put Natasha on his knee and let her read to him, and every letter of every word was an extraordinary delight, like a little piece of magic.

But papa is dead. And now she has Alexei as a friend, and a man by her bed with cold eyes who wants her to go to his school.

Alexei doesn't offer an opinion, just sits quietly and listens to them. So Natasha accepts the invitation, holding out a solemn, bandaged hand to shake, just like she saw papa do with the butcher and the baker when he took her shopping.

The man clasps her hand gently, mindful of the healing, and smiles the way Natasha imagines snakes would smile, if they had lips. She half expects his tongue to dart out, expects him to taste the air between them. 

(He doesn't.)

Later, Alexei tells her that the man scared him, but she just pets his bristly hair and tells him to not be silly. She tells him that he's her best friend, and that school is fun. He'll like it there, and they'll both learn so much.

Alexei doesn't seem convinced.

* * *

They move her and Alexei after three more days in the hospital, when the doctors say her breathing is normal and her burns are healing. It's sad to leave, and one of the nurses cries a little, but Natasha is ready to move on. There is a numbness in the front of her mind, a dull throb that she thinks used to be mama and papa. Alexei holds her hand as they sit in the back of the car that will take her to her new home.

( _"Your hands are scratchy," she told Alexei, the second night in the hospital, and he smiled at her._

_"I have a bow and arrows," he said. "Like Tsarevitch Ivan."_

_She laughed. "Does that make me a frog?"_

_"You will always be my princess, little one."_ )

The ride is long and she falls asleep with her head in Alexei's lap as he sings a lullaby to her; something soft and sad that makes her think of snow and flame and the days ahead, the fact that they are going somewhere hours and hours from Volgograd. 

She has never been so far from home, but when the darkness falls they keep driving. She watches the world rush past, watches the fields give way to farms and then houses and then buildings, the tallest buildings she's ever seen. They are in a city, Alexei tells her. She likes the city, likes how it feels like a forest full of infinite trees.

When the car goes underground she wants to cry, but she decides that these people should see she is strong, they should love her like mama and papa, and then maybe they will not die.

They bundle her out of the car quickly, a strong pair of arms scooping her up and taking her into their building. Her hand loses Alexei's, and he slips away from her in the bustle. She is not afraid; he will find her. She's only known him for a few days, but she trusts Alexei. She believes in him, and he will always come for her.

* * *

The first few days in her new home are strange, but only in so much as they aren't like being in a home at all. More like the hospital. Alexei stays with her, though, through the tests and the questions and the lines and lines of people who march through, making noises at her and taking notes. He tells her not to be afraid, and so she isn't.

(And she still _knows_ of course, she has to _know_ that he isn't real, but a tiny part of her brain, a little corner that is still holding onto the innocence she had before it was burned away -- well, it still believes. A little.)

After the men come more and more tests, endless hours of evaluation - build this shape and complete this pattern and tell us what you see in this picture. Time doesn't mean as much here, it doesn't pass like it did at home when there were still people who loved her, but she thinks it's been weeks, maybe months, and every day there is another test for her.

"You're smart," one of the doctors says, and Natasha smiles at him shyly.

"Thank you."

"Can you tell me about the fire?"

She shakes her head. The only things she remembers are heat, and Alexei, and the men who came to help. She doesn't know how it started, or why, and part of her hopes, vaguely, that she never does. She has a bad feeling, in her stomach, that it was her fault. And if Alexei tries to tell her it wasn't, well. He can only know what she knows, and she barely knows anything.

The doctor makes notes and thoughtful noises, turning to another person in a white coat to chatter quickly in another language. Natasha tries to pick out words, but it's all just gibberish to her, nothing like Russian at all.

Finally they stop their talking and the other person in the other lab coat - it is a woman, Natasha sees, and she has not seen many women since the nurses at the hospital said goodbye - steps forward to peer down her long, thin nose at Natasha.

"We want to--" the woman is regarding Natasha appraisingly, and Natasha cannot help but feel a little like a piece of meat in a butcher case. "There are things we do here, to help girls like you."

Natasha nods slowly when the woman pauses. She understands all these words, but they seem to have very little to do with her.

"Would you like to be strong?" the woman asks. "Would you like to be unbeatable?"

"Yes," Natasha says. She wants those things. She wants more than that, but she wants to know what _strong_ is so badly, what it means to be unbeatable in this world that has taken her parents without so much as an apology.

"Then we will start tomorrow," the woman says.

Sitting next to the bed, Alexei shivers.

"Will it hurt?" Natasha asks.

"Yes," the woman says. "It will hurt very much."

Natasha considers that for a moment. "Will it bring back my mama and papa?"

"No."

"Will it make me stop missing them?"

The woman pauses, staring for a long moment into Natasha's eyes, as though she is searching for something. "It can," she says after a long moment. "If you want it to."

Natasha has more questions, but before she can ask them, the woman turns on her heels and lets the crisp, measured click-clack of her footsteps carry her out of the room, all the other white-coated people swirling in her wake.

"This is a bad idea," Alexei tells her, running a hand through his hair.

"This is the only idea," she says.

"You don't have to do this."

"Then what will I do? Where will I go? They-- she says they can help me, you know. They can help me be like you."

Alexei has no response to that, simply sags back in his seat and closes his eyes.

"I'm sorry," Natasha says, and Alexei smiles a little; a thin, wan smile that doesn't even begin to reach his eyes. 

"I know."

* * *

He is there when they put her under and there when she wakes, but he's sharper somehow, like peppermint or snow or pain - he seems more defined around the edges, her Alexei, and she can't say why.

"Sometimes I think--" he says, but she holds up a hand to stop him.

"What did they--" she can't finish much more than that, can't seem to get the whole question to formulate in her mind.

He doesn't answer in words, which is fine, because he's mostly a figment of her imagination - mostly - but he touches her forehead with his fingertips, and she remembers that Ivanov had told her they were working on brains, and that they could do oh-so-many things with a girl like her.

She didn't ask what, mostly because she didn't want to know. She's been in the Red Room for a month, which is long enough for even a girl of ten to know that there are some questions that she really doesn't need answered.

She drifts for some time, the throbbing in her head dulled by the acidic hiss of painkillers in her veins. She sleeps and wakes and dozes and floats, edging on knowing what's going on without ever fully encountering it. Alexei echoes her, awake and asleep in fits and starts. He's there when she needs him, and he's quiet when she sleeps.

* * *

Days tick by, and Natasha is never sure of time anymore – they tell her she's been here her whole life, and she almost believes them. She's almost forgotten mama and papa and fire and ash, but she has Alexei, and he reminds her when she lies in bed, when she's recovering, and she uses him as a handhold.

"I'm sorry," she tells him, one day after he has reminded her again, of the birthday cake mama had made, the one with sugary towers of meringue for her eighth bithday.

He just shakes his head. "You're getting better," he says.

She doesn't tell him, but she thinks he knows, that she isn't getting better. She's getting meaner, colder. But not better. He doesn't get to come to her trainings all the time, and she shuts him out when they take her to the video room.

(And that is her least favorite place of all time, less so than the hospital or the training grounds-- the video room is where she watches all the bloody horrible things that human beings do to each other. Alexei can't go there because she won't let him, because he would try to stop the videos and her trainers would make it hurt. He's part of something else, something that doesn't belong in the Red Room, that shouldn't see videos of men killing each other and women eating human flesh and blood dripping down fingers, licked up by searching tongues as teeth rend flesh. She watches now without flinching, watches as people destroy each other, which is only what the world would have done to them, anyway.)

After time in the video room, Alexei is more insubstantial - sometimes she can see right through him, like a fading memory, but she can usually reconstruct him bit by bit - rough hands, short hair, bottomless eyes.

"Who were you before you came to me?" she asks him one night, as he holds her hand. She is lying in bed trying to reconstitute him from nothing - for the first time ever, today, when she got back from training, there was no Alexei waiting.

"I was in a circus," he tells her. "I wrestled bears and walked the high wire. And when I got tired of that, I swallowed swords and learned to shoot a bow. I never miss."

He's boasting, but she's okay with that. She imagines all the things he talks about, one after another, imagines the ladies who ride white horses, their hair sparkling with jewels.

"Did you like the circus?"

"No," he says, "I like being here with you."

* * *

They open her skull more times than she can count, surgery after surgery after surgery, and every time they ask her to do things she cannot do. She cannot move an apple with her mind, she cannot light a match. She cannot create a rainstorm or a tea cake. But they tell her to try, so she does.

Nothing ever comes of it.

She makes her first kill at twelve years old, her body just beginning to change. The day after she wrings the life out of the little bird, feels its frantic heart stutter and stop, she gets her first period. She laughs, and tells Alexei that it's right; she's old enough, now, to spill blood.

He doesn't think it's funny.

She wonders if this is what growing up is: learning to kill and losing your best friend. If growing up means more pain, always more pain, and if she'll ever be like the other children, the ones she remembers with the tip of her memory, laughing and running and studying at school.

"You won't be," Alexei confirms. "You'll be something else entirely."

She doesn't mind that at all.

She wants to be strong, like Ivanov and the doctors say she will be, like her trainers promise. She relishes the powerful rush she got as the life faded from her little victim. She wants it, again and again and again.

She gets it; they graduate her up to bigger and bigger animals, ones that fight back and scream and draw blood of their own. She tastes blood in her mouth when she is killing a cat; realizes that its claws have punctured her cheek. She snaps its neck for that, and its bones puncture skin, causing a trickle of blood to begin snaking through its fur. She laps at the blood like the men and women in the videos; it's hot and sticky and metallic, which is what she imagined it would be, and she wants more.

She doesn't tell Alexei that she kills things when she gets back to their room, but she wants to; she wants to tell him about the taste of blood, about the snap-pop of the cat's neck as she killed it.

He wouldn't understand.

But now she has an urge, and she tastes the hot blood of every animal she kills because she can, because it sends the heat coursing through her, down to her core.

* * *

When Natasha is thirteen, she thinks that she has killed two of every animal. She had killed enough to fill an ark of misery and sail it into the world they are building. For her birthday, Ivanov gives her a knife and a wicked smile.

What's waiting in the training room isn't an animal. Well, it is. But it also happens to be a _human_ animal. It's young, female, about the same age she was when her mama and papa became dust.

It's crying, wet blubbery sobs like it's been hurt, and Natasha creeps on the balls of her bare feet towards the pathetic thing. It is harmless to her. It cannot kill - its nails are short and its breathing ragged. It's naked, bruises blooming all over its body, from red-purple to sickly green. It will die no matter what she does.

"Help me," it says, looking up at Natasha with eyes that are almost comprehensible, a look on its face like so many wounded animals.

Some part of her wants to soothe it, wants to say words to the animal so it will not be afraid, but Natasha doesn't know how to do that. She barely remembers what it feels like to not be afraid.

So instead she rears back and plunges her knife down. She's aiming for the eye, but she misses, the animal moves at the last moment, and instead the knife nicks the soft tissue of its cheek, drawing a red line across its face to its ear.

Her victim screams, and Natasha pulls the knife back to slash again, this time cutting a ribbon across the palms of its hands, held up uselessly to fend her off. This is worse than rabbits, she thinks, a worse noise. But she knows what to do. She has a thousand ways to kill an animal in her mind, and a thousand and one ways to make it suffer. She could easily take out the tongue, slit the belly, and remove the fingers, watching her prey writhe and whimper for hours, only dying when Natasha finally allowed it.

She feels pleasure at that idea, a slick, hot twist of her gut, but something snaps instead, and without knowing why, she lashes a foot out, kicking the animal once, hard, under the chin. It falls backwards, stunned, and Natasha takes the initiative to slit its throat.

It gurgles its last breath, wet and rattling, as Natasha sits back on her heels and licks the blood, salt and copper, from the blade of her new knife.

She is taken back to her room that night, and though she can imagine what he looks like, though she knows the sound of his voice like the back of her own hand, she cannot make Alexei appear.

* * *

She becomes the Black Widow: a creature of agony and revenge, a story whispered when the darkest people congregate in the darkest places. She is a weapon, she is a tool, she is death.

She was a little girl once, a girl with a mama and a papa, a girl with a home and a doll, a girl with an imaginary friend who kept the monsters at bay.

And now she is a monster.

She is a god. 

And seven years after Alexei leaves her, seven years after her last tears fell and were dried with metal fingertips, he comes back to her.

* * *

Natasha is tired, more than anything else. Tired of living, of fighting, of losing. She feels like she's done nothing but lose since she was ten years old. Even when she wins battles, she loses the war.

And tonight, she's been fighting in a London factory full of smoke and in flame. She's danced across the vision of too many men and women tonight, leaving nothing but a red slash and a quiet death in her wake. She is sore and singed, and she wears the blood of her victims like the finest ball gown, like jewels adorning her fingers and throat.

There are more people to kill - three women and a man left on the list that her employer gave her - and they're somewhere in this factory, because it is their last safe house. They have nowhere else to hide, and she will run them out of their burrow and leave them bleeding in the streets. Distantly she remembers when she thought of people as nothing but a different kind of animal to kill, how she was cold and ruthless and feral. Now she knows better, knows what they are, and what she is - she is the angel of darkness and destruction, a harbinger of death. She is more than they are, so much more.

A noise draws her attention to the catwalk in front of her - there is a man there, she can just see his silhouette as he makes a motion. In a moment, the movement permeates her hazy, carnage-numb brain; he is drawing a bow.

She steps forward to see better, because there is only one man she has ever known to use a bow and arrow, and he came to her in a fire, too. But he wasn't real.

A face emerges out of the smoke as she approaches, resolves into shapes. A blunt nose and weathered skin, short dirty-blond hair and the serious set of his lips. Natasha inhales violently, getting a lungful of ash and heat.

"Alexei," she says, and she rushes him.

He's not expecting her speed; he was gone before they gave it to her. She's on him before he can react, bats the bow aside and throws her arms around his neck. "Alexei," she mutters. It doesn't make a whit of sense - he feels solid and real and it's been seven years since she saw him, but she knows it's him, with a certainty she hasn't felt since childhood.

He is frozen in her embrace. After a moment he slowly lifts his arm, but instead of returning her affection, cold steel kisses her temple. A gun.

"You're not Alexei," she whispers in his ear, and he chuckles, low and threatening.

"You're not trying to kill me," he replies, and maybe he's trying to keep the surprise out of his voice, but it's still there, around the edges.

She releases him and takes a step back to study him for a long moment, disregarding the gun he's pointing at her. He _is_ Alexei, he has to be. Except Alexei spoke Russian flawlessly, and this man has an American accent. And Alexei never held a gun to her head.

She holds her hands up in surrender. She could, in all actuality, take him out. She could knock the gun from his hand with a kick and have him bleeding on the ground before he knew what hit him. But she doesn't. Because he's wearing Alexei's face, and seeing that is like fresh air to her burning lungs, like the tang of blood and the rush of the kill. It's _everything_ , and it's the one thing she can't destroy.

"I thought you were--" she pauses. There is so little she can say that will matter at all. "Someone else."

He shakes his head. "Who?"

She wants to kill him, to stop the truth. She tries to make herself, tries to reach up and get a hold of him, but her muscles won't respond.

"You're here to kill me," she says.

The man nods. "I am."

"So kill me."

They stand, eyes locked in the heat and the chaos. She had four more people to kill tonight, so he should either shoot her or let her get to it.

The minutes tick by. He sighs and holsters his gun. "This place is going to go," he says, and he's not wrong. They have ten minutes before it collapses, fifteen until it explodes. She should know; she planted the bombs.

"Leave," he says. "And I'll tell my bosses I couldn't find you."

"Why?"

"Because," he snaps. She wants to know, she has to know. Who is this man, and why does he have Alexei's face, and Alexei's voice, and Alexei's mercy.

"You'll just kill me another day," she says.

"Then come with me," he replies, "or kill me. But--" he lets out a shaky breath, and she feels unfamiliar hope surge in her heart. "I'm not going to kill you."

He turns to leave and, though she knows it's a foolish thing to do, Natasha follows.

* * *

She follows her new friend through the darkened streets of the city, back to his safehouse. They don't talk much on the way, just enough for her to gather that his name is Clint, he's in his late thirties, and he's never been to Russia.

He carries his bow in a case, which seems too clever by half until she realizes that it's got a SHIELD insignia on the inside, and then things start to click. SHIELD's been after her for a while, and she's left more than a few of their agents bleeding in her wake. What they're doing in England is a mystery, but it's not like she belongs here either, so she'll ignore that for now.

The place he's staying is a sparsely furnished two-room flat above an abandoned storefront, but it's more than she has. He lets her in, not glancing back, and shrugs out of his vest.

"Gonna kill me?" he asks, in English.

She shakes her head. 

"Gonna rob me?"

"No."

He turns to regard her for a long moment. "I need a shower," he says. "You're not invited. When I get out, we can trade information. If you leave, I'll let you go. If you stay, I want answers."

She doesn't know what to say, which works out fine because he doesn't wait for a response before marching into the bathroom and locking the door with a deafening click. Not that she's going to try to seduce him until she knows where he got his face from.

And maybe she's wrong. Maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was smoke inhalation and the insanity of her life that's finally catching up with her and making her see Alexei in him. Maybe he doesn't look like Alexei at all, maybe she just needs something from him. Maybe her memories, which can be spotty at best, are finally failing her. Maybe this is some kind of test from some kind of powerful someone, trying to fool her into trusting them.

Or maybe he has the face of a man she invented when she was ten, to deal with the grief of losing her parents.

Whatever the truth is, she doesn't see walking away as an option. She doesn't see how she can keep living, knowing this man is out there, and never knowing why.

When he appears from the bathroom, his hair dripping little rivulets down his neck, he stares at her.

"You didn't leave."

"No."

He smiles, a kind of genuine smile that makes Natasha's heart hurt. "Good."

* * *

They talk for hours. He asks her a thousand questions, about who she was before the Red Room, about training with them, about her freelance work, about the people she's killed for fun and for profit.

Natasha doesn't answer every question, and when she does she's not always truthful, but he has to know that's how she plays the game. In turn, he answers some of her own questions, which, she realizes, are probably much more personal than his, and have a good chance of tipping her hand if she's not careful.

Finally, the air in the room thick with secrets and things left unsaid, Barton leans in towards her, resting his elbows on his knees and fixing her in his gaze.

"Who," he asks, "is Alexei?"

Her first inclination is to laugh at him, to tell him exactly what she thought she saw in the warehouse, exactly who he looks like. Instead she bites her cheek.

"My husband," she says, for lack of a better answer.

"And he looks like me?"

She shrugs. "Somewhat, I guess. He-- I haven't seen him in a very long time. At first glance-- do you ever forget what people look like, Agent Barton? You ever see the faces of people long gone when you scan a crowd?"

He nods slightly. "I-- yeah."

"Nothing more than that," she says.

"Then why did you come here?"

That, she realizes, is something she can't answer. Not without giving him the whole of herself, and he can't have that, not yet.

"I want to defect," she says, instead. "I want to work for SHIELD."

"I'm not sure they'll have you," he tells her, scrubbing at his eyes with the pad of his hand. "They kinda want you dead."

"And yet," she smiles. "They sent an assassin who let me live, and invited me home for tea."

"There's been no tea," he says. "And I could lose a lot on this."

"But what will you gain," she lets the words suggest what she could never do, not without answers. "If you bring me back."

He stares at her for a moment that stretches into a year - it's been too long since she's seen that stare, since she's felt those eyes on her, and it's all she can do not to get angry, to ask him where he's been and why he left, because this still isn't Alexei, this is still an American archer who works for SHIELD.

Finally, he blinks and turns away. "I'll call an extraction team," he says. "Feel free to take a shower if you want to get that--" He makes a circular motion with his hand, a kind of helpless flail that sings of Alexei. "Taken care of."

She allows him to see her smile. "Thank you."

He captures her gaze with his for a searing instant, like he's trying to understand her game with just sheer willpower, but it doesn't last, and she settles in to wait.

* * *

The world of SHIELD is a castle built of questions, a steady march of men and women in uniforms who demand information and make precise notes on clipboards when she decides to humor them with an answer. Natasha regrets, in her lonelier moments, ever allowing herself to believe in Barton. Ever allowing herself to follow him at all.

But the moments between, the moments when he comes to talk to her, to sit in her room. Those moments melt into her skin like a balm, sharp and spicy and comfortable.

He doesn't know who he is, she's figured that much out. But he's also absolutely Alexei. Because really, the idea of one circus-trained archer is too improbable to believe; two is just out of the question.

But Barton - he wants her to call him Clint, and not Barton, which is somehow achingly American of him and she just can't do it - has stories of growing up in Iowa, of a brother, of a whole life that Natasha could never have given Alexei. A life she never _gave_ Alexei.

She shares her own stories, carefully edited to fit the audience. She never mentions Alexei, or the fire that took her parents, and they never ask. She never tells them what she is, and they assume her humanity is a given. Anyway, SHIELD seems to be much more interested with the Red Room product than who she actually is. They can read signs of her training on her body - scars from surgeries and muscles that have torn or strained and bones that have broken - but she's secure in the fact that they can't, no matter how much they might wish to, read her mind.

* * *

She's been with SHIELD for a month when Barton strides into her quarters like he owns them it and tosses a plain manila folder on the table in front of her.

"What's this?" she asks.

"You tell me," Barton says, sliding into the chair opposite her.

She reaches out and opens the folder. It's a file, which is to be expected, topped with her picture and basic stats.

The subsequent pages are more of the same - records of jobs that she's done, and some that she hasn't, but SHIELD thinks she might. Names and places and weapons, photos of bodies oozing life, and suspicious stains. All her greatest hits, in a folder.

"Looks like a dossier," she says.

Barton's long fingers are wrapped around his biceps. If her were another man, his knuckles would be going bloodless from the grip, but he's trained not to give away tells like that, and his only sign of stress is in the corded muscles of his jaw, which is clenched so tightly she thinks it might snap. He wants to do something, she decides, but he's afraid.

"Keep going," he says through gritted teeth.

She does, and the pages turn from crisp printouts to old relics, yellowed around the edges and hand written in Cyrillic. Pages from the Red Room, she knows, the familiar HYDRA crest on the upper right corner of the page. Her heart sinks at the sight. If they have these, they know too much.

"What am I looking for?" she asks.

Barton breathes out in a huff of irritation. "You called me Alexei, the night we met," he says, and his voice is strained and threadbare. "And you told me that was your husband."

"It is," she lies. "He was."

Barton growls and grabs up the folder, flipping pages in a blur until he finds the one he wants.

It's a picture she barely remembers drawing, but it's recognizable as something done by her hand - the strokes are the same short, truncated ones she always uses to write, the ink almost brutally applied to the page.

It's a face, a face drawn too well for a girl of ten or eleven, the details too fine and the eyes too emotive. But she knows that, if she drew it, she would have been that young. Or younger. She knows because she's drawn Alexei. She drew _Barton_.

"Subject draws this face repeatedly. Called Alexei. Imaginary friend? Candidate for psychotronics," Barton says, and Natasha turns the paper over to find those words - or nearly - written neatly in Russian.

"What do you want me to say?" she asks.

"Tell me," he says, and his eyes are soft, which she's pretty sure is a lie, but it's one she needs.

"You'll think I'm insane."

Barton laughs gently. "You're a child soldier turned assassin who was drawing pictures of my adult face in the 90s. You're worried about what I'm going to think?"

She has to give him that. "Will you tell Fury?"

He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. "That really depends on what you tell me."

She feels small, young, and thinks that if she's ever going to tell Barton, now is the time. If she ever plans to have a relationship with this man, ever wants to know what actually makes him tick, she needs to get this done. 

"воображаемый друг," she says. "Imaginary friend."

He doesn't say anything, just waits. Which is somehow more unnerving.

"His name was Alexei, and he showed up the night my parents died. Held my hand, stayed with me in the hospital. I only knew him-- knew? Had? I don't know -- for three years. He left me, or I lost him, when I was thirteen, around the time I started--" She chokes a little on the next words, which is weird because she's never choked on an idea before, not that she can remember. "Killing. When I started killing _people_. He left me."

Barton crosses his arms and stares at her, the silence between them stretching into all the little nooks and crannies of her newly bared soul.

"You actually believe that, don't you?" he asks, after galaxies have been born and died in the time he's taken to stare.

"Fuck you," she says.

"So you, what, created me?"

She shrugs. "Like I know."

"This is nuts," he says, getting up so quickly she imagines his ass must be on fire. "You-- you're--" He runs an agitated hand through his close-cropped hair. "I'm _older_ than you!"

"Yeah," she agrees, "you are. I don't have an answer for you, Barton. I've told you what I know."

She sees the doubt on his face, and it stings like a thousand needles in her skin. He thinks she's lying, she realizes. He thinks she's manipulating him, that she's looking for something to gain.

"Barton--"

He shakes his head, still moving frenetically, like he's being shocked with electricity. There's no reason, none at all, for him to be this flustered over an idea he's pretending not to believe. 

"What's psychotronics?" he asks.

She rolls the word around in her head for a minute, before realizing that it was on the back of the drawing. "A program," she tells him. "One I guess I was qualified for. You think they told me anything at all?"

"Have you ever had brain surgery?"

"Have _you_?"

He actually stops moving, bending down to place his hands flat on the table and stare into her eyes. "Did the Red Room try to give you psychic abilities?"

She clenches her fists under the table, her nails biting into the soft flesh of her palms. "I don't know," she says. "They did a lot of things to me. They lengthened my legs and opened my skull and taught me to kill. But if you want to know why-- You'd have to ask them."

"Okay," he breathes. " _Okay_. I'm going to go back to my quarters now, and I'm going to get some answers." He gathers up the papers in front of her, stuffing them haphazardly into the folder. He pauses when he touches the drawing of himself, stares at it for a moment, and then slides it to sit, centered and prominent, in front of her. "You think of anything I need to know, you come and tell me."

He doesn't give her any time to respond before turning on his heel and marching from the room as definitively as he entered it.

"Залу́па," she mutters under her breath, because it's the only word she can think of to describe both the situation and Clint Fucking Barton. Her fingers find the picture he left, the ink faded and the paper yellowing. She lifts it, taking another moment to appreciate how skilled she was at faces and hate herself for it. Finally, when she's memorized every miniscule wrinkle she recorded, Natasha begins to tear the picture into pieces. Her heart breaks as she watches Barton- watches _Alexei_ \- disappear into shreds and scraps.

When she drops the ruins of the picture into the bin, they fall with the resounding echo of a door being slammed.

* * *

_In his dream, Clint is timeless._

_He is in a room with a little girl, somewhere underground. Somewhere that smells like decay and blood. The little girl is crouched in the center of the room, her back to him and her hair like flames against the stark white of the walls._

_He says her name, and she doesn't look up, so he walks to her, his pulse racing and his breath shaky._

_He touches her shoulder as he crouches behind her, and she looks up at him with a smile, blood smeared across her face._

_In her lap is the remains of an animal - a fox, he thinks - and he knows, with a dreamer's logic, that she has killed it with her hands._

_The stomach of the fox is split open, and Natasha has sorted the insides- here is the bowel, here is the stomach, here is the liver – into neat little piles._

_In her hand she clutches the heart, a neat bite taken out of the hard muscle._

_"Hungry?" she asks, holding out her bloodied hand, offering the now-still heart of her prey to him, as sacrifice and snack._

_Clint gags, the sight too much. He is losing her._

* * *

Natasha has a full docket of activities to complete her integration into SHIELD. Once they establish that she meets their baseline of sanity (which, considering the people she meets and the stories she hears, has to be low) they're quick to take her into training.

And training is exhausting. The agent she works with, a bald suit called Sitwell, tells her that they're looking for the edge of her endurance, for the place where the surgeries and tortures and programming end and the woman begins.

She's pretty sure there is no such place, but she does it anyway. And somewhere in the wind sprints and sparring and the gymnastic obstacle courses, three weeks slip by. Three weeks without word from Barton, with just the memory of his retreat and the flutter of scraps of paper.

(In the middle of the second week she asks Sitwell, casually, if Barton is around, and Sitwell just tells her to focus on the punching bag and doesn't answer.)

When she sees Barton again, it's in a hallway, fleetingly, as she is shuffled from one meeting to another. He's sporting a tan, his face not quite sun-darkened enough to hide the bags under his eyes. She gives him two more days to come and find her, but when the silence is too deafening to bear, she decides to seek him out instead.

She knows that field agents get offices to share, tiny cells with four desks apiece and a sliver of window, if they rank high enough. Barton shares his with other members of Strike Team Delta, which she isn't supposed to know about, and it's on a floor that she really shouldn't be able to access. But as good as SHIELD is, she's better.

He's tapping at his keyboard when she comes in, probably writing about where his tan came from, and the other agents who share the space are (not so coincidentally) absent.

"Hi," she says after a minute, when he doesn't look up.

He grunts a response, which makes anger flare under her skin. But of course he's upset, he thinks she's a crazy person who believes she invented him.

"You've been gone for a while," she says, leaning against the doorframe. If he would just _look up_ he'd see a beautiful woman staring at him, her body snaking in all the right directions, but he seems to be intent on his screen. "You got some sun."

She takes a step into the room, and when he doesn't respond she takes a few more towards his desk, emboldened by the anger now boiling in her belly.

"Barton." She's behind his monitor now, where all he has to do is move his stupid eyes to see her. " _Clint_."

He sighs. "What do you want?"

Her palms itch with the dark need to slap the monitor off his desk, the indifferent glare off his face, but she doesn't. That's not how this story goes.

"We need to talk," she says.

"About what?"

"How about the last time I saw you."

Barton closes his eye and sighs again, a labored effort full of annoyance. "You mean when you told me you had god-like powers? When you said you created me?"

"No," she hisses, through gritted teeth. "When you walked out before I could explain."

He laces his fingers together behind his head, leaning back in his chair nonchalantly and giving her a lazy glance. He wants to play at unaffected, at calm, but she sees the familiar bulge of a clenched jaw, the baggy eyes and the worried teeth marks on his lips. He's bothered, probably by her.

"So, explain," he says.

That catches her off balance a little- she'd mostly been expecting him to tell her to fuck off. And she has nothing new to tell him. "I don't know the whole story," she starts. "Because I don't think I _can_. Here's what I know: the Room gave me a lot of brain surgeries. And what they had to do with psychotronics and ESP experiments is beyond me, but I could never do any of the things they wanted, like lighting a candle or moving a pencil. So I guess they thought it didn't work. But--" She rubs at her eyes with her palm, searching for the next words. "What if--and this is a big what if that sounds equally as insane to me as it does to you-- _what if_ they did something right? And what if that operated-on brain took something I believed in, took Alexei, and made him real?"

Barton rolls his eyes. "And what if we live in the real world, Romanoff, where shit like that doesn't happen."

The anger rears up inside her. "Or maybe there's a whole school full of kids who can do shit like that in upstate New York!"

"You're not a mutant," he says. "We checked."

"But I'm not exactly human, either."

Barton's still relaxed, still has his careless posture, but his arms are starting to shake from the strain of holding it under tension. "You are," he says, in a deadly kind of quiet voice, like silk and poison. "You're exactly human."

She takes a step back. She hasn't thought of herself as human in years - she's more than that, better. She's a predator, a thing that waits in the dark to steal away with a person's life. She left her humanity on the floor of training rooms and operating tables and the cold bed of her trainer. They took her humanity out, bled her like a stuck pig, and replaced it with killer.

"Fuck you," she growls.

"What do you think," he asks, rising from his desk, and she can see the anger in him now, the smoky singe behind his eyes and the warning in his voice. "That you were better? That you weren't just a murderer? Just a little girl with blood on her chin," he snaps, and she feels like she's been slapped. "Coming in here like she's a god, like she can create life."

"No," she breathes. "I never _created_ life."

He stares at her, dumbfounded. All the fight has left him with those words, with the admission of what she's done, what she is. If she is a god, she is a vengeful one, she is a destroyer and not a creator. She is a killer through and through.

"Natasha--"

"I'm sorry," she bites out, turning to leave. "I get it. I'll leave you alone."

He doesn't say anything as she storms out, doesn't chase after her or try to stop her. Which is really too bad, because she'd very much like him to start something, so that she could punish someone for the things she's done.

Faces swim before her eyes as her feet take her, unbidden, back to the quarters she calls home. A girl begging on the mat, and no mercy to be found. An old man, no teeth and no will to survive, neck snapped by her tiny hands. And on and on, gunshots and widow's bites and broken bones, the trail of bodies like a gristly carpet she's walked over to get to where she is.

She is no god, and if she has any power at all, it is the power of any fool with a will and a knife. She is no fallen angel, no terrible beauty come to smite the wicked and right wrongs. She is just a story, told in darkness.

She is just a human.

* * *

_He's in the room again, and the girl who will be Natasha is sitting with him, pressed against his side._

_She's humming a song he almost knows, one she gave to him on a dark night when a car moved through the inky blackness to her new home. A lullaby._

_She rocks herself with it, singing of mother closing shutters, and the night with its darkness. She is solid and warm, while he feels so cold and fleeting, but he puts his arm around her to hold her close._

_He doesn't look at the blood on the ground, the smear of life she left when she killed the little mice, swung them one by one by their tails against the ground until they stopped moving and she could rest._

_The tear tracks on her cheeks are fresh but her eyes are dry. She sits and rocks back and forth, humming, staring at the line of bodies she made, tiny bodies with no life left in them all in a row._

_"I killed them," she breathes, her voice trembling. "Lyosha, they're dead."_

_She is so young, and so small, and her heart is exactly as broken as his._

* * *

Natasha avoids Barton after their blowup. Not because she's hurt by his words, but because he so clearly doesn't want to see her. Natasha has had enough people force themselves into her life; she has no intention of forcing herself on anyone else.

But of course that can't last, because this is SHIELD and Nick Fury is a cruel master. She gets the orders on a Tuesday, less than a week after he built a weapon of words and ran her through. For her very first mission with this group of do-gooder American psychotics, she is assigned to a recon mission in Guatemala. With Barton as backup.

She'd love to sit with someone in the mess and commiserate over stale coffee, but the only person she even liked was Barton, and well. That idea is just silly.

So instead she sits in her quarters, a pen in her hand, idly sketching her memories. 

_Here is an arm, cold and inhuman, with a star on the shoulder._

_Here is a girl, eyes wide with shock and neck gaping like a smile._

_Here is a heart, small in her fist, with a jagged bite ripped from it._

_Here is Alexei, his eyes sad and lonely._

She's absorbed in the last one, trying to get the expression right, trying to make it honest, and she doesn't even hear the knock on her door. She only notices the person who enters when he's already in the room.

"Barton," she says, and this time she gets to be the one who won't look up. He made her work for it, now he can rot.

"Romanoff," he replies, and if his voice is warmer than she thought it might be, she tries not to be surprised. He is a creature of whimsy.

"What can I do for you? A plague, maybe? Not enough loaves and fishes?"

He laughs, a bitter biting sound, and that actually gets her to look at him. His eyes are still shadowed, his features sagging as he tries to maintain composure.

"You look like shit," she tells him.

He shrugs. "I-- I have dreams."

"Me too," she says, looking down at her drawings before making a decision, and crumpling the paper into a ball. "You ever have the one where your teeth fall out?"

"I have one--" He takes a step towards her, hesitant and a little sad, somehow. "I dream about a room underground that smells like blood. And there's a little girl there. She kills things. She kills all kinds of things - cats and mice and bunnies, a fox one time - and I wake up." He sighs deeply, like this hurts his soul. "I wake up like I've lost you."

He has her attention now, his face capturing her gaze. He's a good liar. They both are. But she knows his tell, can read the muscles of his neck like a book, and they're not talking. This is truth, this is honesty. Barton has dreams about her and the things she did.

"You lose me?"

He nods. "The girl is you, every time."

She doesn't know what to say. She wants to make it better for him, but she can't reward his honesty with lies. She just can't bring herself to lie this time, and lying used to be her default setting. 

"Sounds like my childhood," she offers instead. "Sounds like training."

His face falls further, which she's somewhat surprised is even possible. 

"I can't--" He reaches out, as if the words he wants might be in front of him, but his hands close on empty air. He crosses his arms in frustration, before shifting his weight and huffing out a breath. "I can't sleep."

"I'm sorry?" It's only a question because she doesn't know how he wants her to feel about that, isn't sure what his endgame is here.

"I can't close my eyes without seeing all that. And it's only since-- you know, since I saw your drawing."

She stares at him blankly. He's asking for something, that much is clear, but whatever it is, she doesn't have it. And even if she did, she's not sure she can give it to him.

Finally he breaks, running an impatient hand through his hair. "Can you take them away?" he asks. "If you made-- the dreams, if you gave them to me. If you made--" He shakes his head. "Assuming you're right, which I really don't think you are. Assuming the Red Room made you some kind of psychic matter creator thing. Can you undo it?"

"Undo it?"

He seems to explode into a flurry of movement, every muscle of his body twitching, and she half expects him to turn and put his fist through the wall. "Can you unmake me? Can you take away the dreams? What can you do?"

She feels like someone's hit her, the buzzing feeling of a well-thrown punch echoing through her head and in her ears. "I don't know."

Natasha honestly can't think of a single thing in her life that seems out of the ordinary - not that "ordinary" is a meaningful word to her. No doors that mysteriously opened, candles that blew out, nothing. Her life is a trail of blood and sweat, everything she's achieved has been earned. There's nothing she can write off to magic.

"I had an imaginary friend," she says, for lack of anything better. "And I guess-- I mean, he kept me safe. From fire and monsters and cold. Held my hand. But I grew up. I grew up fast, Barton. I hurt, and I maimed, and I tortured. And when I was feeling really kind, I killed. And--" She takes a deep breath, because this hurts, it hurts way too much. "And then I killed a person, and I didn't have a friend anymore, because monsters and murderers don't get to have friends. But here _you_ are, and I don't know what you are, or what I did, but what you dream - the things you're dreaming? They're all things I did. Some of them because I had to. Most of them because I wanted to. So no, I can't take away your dreams. Because I can't take away my past."

He doesn't say anything, just stares. He waits. She isn't sure there's anything else to say, anything else she can give him. Still, she takes a deep breath, and lets it out shakily. "As to unmaking-- I don't think so, no. Whatever happened, whatever crazy delusion we're sharing, you're a person, now. A person with a life and a history and-- and the things that people get. If I created you, I created you. But I didn't make you who you are."

He nods slowly. "I don't understand," he says, "but I think I see."

She wants to laugh at how utterly bizarre this all is, at the complete clusterfuck that is her life. But it isn't funny, not really. It's real. For her, and for Barton.

"So we're partners," she says, and he laughs, which makes her smile. At least one of them has it in them to play like this is a game.

"We're partners," he agrees. "All the way to Colombia."

"Guatemala," she says, and he shrugs.

"What does-- what does this whole thing mean?"

"I don't know," she says. "What do you want it to mean?"

"Can it mean that we're friends?"

She blinks, surprised at the sound of the word. It's not one she's had anyone call her, not for over a decade, and it almost sounds foreign when it's applied to her. "Friends?"

"Yeah. I figure, you already got to be friends with me when you were a kid, and I'm jealous. Because I'm a great friend. So I think you owe me one."

"So you're okay with all this? All the-- whatever it is?"

"No," he says. "But I think we can make it work."

"How?"

"Well, we go to Guatemala, right? And you get the info and I get your back. And then, when we come home, maybe you can be—there. For me. Maybe we can talk about things, and you can tell me about—I don't know. But I think I need—I need you. To sort this out. And we can see where it goes from here, but that's, you know, the general gist."

Natasha nods. "Are you going to tell Fury and them?"

"Oh, sure," his voice is wry. "'Hey, boss, did you know I was Romanoff's imaginary friend? Small world, right?' Yeah, no. That would not go well for me."

"I'm sorry," she says.

He cocks his head, looking at her for a long moment.

"For what?"

"For-- I don't know. Telling you? Making you? Doing all the things you-- giving you dreams?"

He smiles softly. "I appreciate that. But like you said, it's done. So we move on."

She stands, brushing her hands on her pants and crossing the room to where he stands. "I want to try something," she says.

He raises an eyebrow, but doesn't object as she reaches up to wrap her arms around his neck.

Reflexively, his arms encircle her waist, and he lets her pull him into the embrace.

Natasha breathes in against his shoulder, and feels herself grin. He's warm, and solid, and he smells like soap and pine tar. It's the kind of thing Alexei never had, the kind of lived in moments and well-worn skin that makes Barton who he is.

When she lets go, savoring the slide of her fingers against the back of his neck, it's a little like a goodbye; a farewell to the folly that led her here, a purge of the things she's been holding onto for too long. But it's also a hello, a beginning. When she looks up again, the eyes that look back at her are unmistakably Clint's, and she can't help herself. She smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> Story contains:  
> -violence against animals  
> -children murdering other children  
> -graphic violence  
> -the Red Room in general  
> -a reference to canon relationships that are less than ethical


End file.
